Tuesday: Hili dialogue

This is one of those days where I arrive at work, having crept like a snail unwillingly to school, having no idea what I will write. But there’s always Hili!

It’s Tuesday, the Cruelest Day: March 6, 2018, and National Oreo Day. (That’s one American cookie I like, but always with milk. Green tea Oreos, available only in Japan, are even better.) It’s also the Day of the Dude, celebrating the philosophy of Dudeism, which is completely new to me. Wikipedia notes that this philosophy comes from the movie The Big Lebowski:

The Dudeist belief system is essentially a modernized form of Taoism stripped of all of its metaphysical and medical doctrines. Dudeism advocates and encourages the practice of “going with the flow”, “being cool headed”, and “taking it easy” in the face of life’s difficulties, believing that this is the only way to live in harmony with our inner nature and the challenges of interacting with other people. It also aims to assuage feelings of inadequacy that arise in societies which place a heavy emphasis on achievement and personal fortune. Consequently, simple everyday pleasures like bathing, bowling, and hanging out with friends are seen as far preferable to the accumulation of wealth and the spending of money as a means to achieve happiness and spiritual fulfillment.

On March 6, 632, or so it is said, Muhammad gave his ” Farewell Sermon” near Mount Arafat, east of Mecca. On this day in 1665, the first issue of the science journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society was published in London. On March 6, 1836, after a siege of 13 days by 3,000 Mexican troops, the 187 Texans defending the Alamo were killed as the fort was finally captured. The dead included Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie. It was on this day in 1869 that Dmitri Mendeleev presented his periodic table of the elements to the Russian Chemical Society. He then published them in the German chemistry journal Zeitschrift fϋr Chemie. Here is the first published periodic table:

Exactly 30 years later, Bayer registered the name “aspirin” as a trademark. On March 6, 1951, the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for espionage began in New York. Both were convicted and electrocuted. Finally, on this day in 1964, the boxing champion Cassius Clay was given his Muslim name by Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad: Clay’s name was henceforth to be Muhammad Ali.

Like many artists, Georgia O’Keeffe had a Siamese cat (any hypotheses?). Here they are:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Malgorzata took a rare and very cute picture of Andrzej with Hili. What is Hili doing up there? Malgorzata explains:

Sometimes when I’m not at the computer or when she becomes bored with sitting on my arm she goes over to Andrzej and jumps on him. Sometimes she sits on his lap but sometimes she wants to be in his arms. She does it of her own volition. Neither of us is picking her up when we are working. She really slows us down.

And her explanation of the dialogue: “Everything you learn, no matter how interesting and confirming your opinion, should be verified”.

A: It’s interesting.

Hili: Yes, but how to verify it?

In Polish:

Ja: To interesujące.
Hili: Tak, ale jak to sprawdzić?

And up in Winnipeg, Gus got some leftover tuna meant for the staff!

Is that tuna I smell?

Please?

Whisker-licking good!

Matthew sent a Japanese tweet; it’s a wasp-mimicking moth, but look at its bizarre legs!

It’s one of the most spectacular things I’ve ever seen. As many as 700,000 Snow Geese are at the DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge right now. You better come quick. They could leave at any time! @KETVpic.twitter.com/B6dnkd3Ter

Finally, reader Luke sent this tweet, which mirrors the story of Muhammad and his favorite cat Muezza. It’s said that one day Muhammad had to rise to answer the call to prayer but found Muezza was sleeping on his sleeve. He cut off his sleeve rather than disturb the cat. This must be a trope:

Texans like to talk about their glorious revolution. They ignore the real history. It was an invasion of colonists from the United States who wanted to keep their slaves. Slavery was abolished in Mexico in 1829. The constitution of the newly independent Texas Republic (adopted in 1836) explicit legalized slavery.

Yes, Texas was a slaveholding republic from its conception. Section 9 of the General Provisions of its original constitution (1836) stated the following:

“SEC. 9. All persons of color who were slaves for life previous to their emigration to Texas, and who are now held in bondage, shall remain in the like state of servitude, provide the said slave shall be the bona fide property of the person so holding said slave as aforesaid. Congress shall pass no laws to prohibit emigrants from the United States of America from bringing their slaves into the Republic with them, and holding them by the same tenure by which such slaves were held in the United States; nor shall Congress have power to emancipate slaves; nor shall any slave-holder be allowed to emancipate his or her slave or slaves, without the consent of Congress, unless he or she shall send his or her slave or slaves without the limits of the Republic. No free person of African descent, either in whole or in part, shall be permitted to reside permanently in the Republic, without the consent of Congress, and the importation or admission of Africans or negroes into this Republic, excepting from the United States of America, is forever prohibited, and declared to be piracy.”

This provision made it extremely difficult for slaves to be freed, not only be individual masters but by the Texas congress itself. Of course, after just about 15 years after being annexed by the United States, the state seceded to join the Confederacy.

One must give Texas credit for how well it has managed to sustain the myth of the glorious fight for Texan freedom.

For Mendeleev, they really were elements–irreducible substances out of which everything else was made.

Not knowing about neutrons was what caused problems for the table, since Mendeleev only knew atomic weights. So argon showed up out of order, because the radiogenic argon in our atmosphere is neutron-heavy.

Mendeleev at the end of its life seems to have thought that the elements as we know them are “peaks” on what might be a wave process. In particular, he thought there might be elements lighter than hydrogen and also between helium and lithium.

Seriously though, it’s incredible that, despite not knowing what protons and electrons are, he still managed to get the table more or less correct and her had the insight to realise that the gaps weren’t a problem for his ides but elements still to be discovered.

It is interesting to read a bit how he thought these things through. M. always said that the *periodic law* was the discovery, not the table, which is just a representation of the law as we can understand it. (This is an interesting and IMO correct use of law vs. law statement, which are merrily confused even to this day.)

For all his genius, however, the “misses” are also interesting, for example the insistence that tellurium and iodine must have their atomic masses misdetermined. Also many *not found* elements.

Understanding elemental periodicity is still an open question – see Scerri’s book on the periodic table on why additional purely ‘chemical resemblance’ hypotheses apparently have to be added to get the physical descriptions to come from the non-ab itio calculations.

The 6 March for Mendeleev’s presentation of the periodic table refers to the Julian calendar and corresponds to the 18 March on our, Gregorian, calendar. Russia only switched to the Gregorian calendar after the October Revolution.

More than one factor probably figures into the frequent observation that artists in the early 20th century were the frequent staff of Siamese cats. I suggest one factor is that the breed was significantly more common decades ago so the probability of a human serving as their staff would be higher.

That bridge machine: There must be a very large premium on not disturbing the local landscape. I suppose it’s also cost effective to load the segments to the rail cars at the manufacturing site and then place them directly from the cars. Pretty cool.

Traditionally, concrete bridges were built using ‘falsework’, huge timber structures built up from the bottom of the valley, and the span poured in situ on top. The falsework then has to be dismantled and re-erected for the next span.

Most modern beam bridges are ‘prestressed’, meaning the steel is put under tension when the concrete is poured in a ‘precasting yard’. It makes for economies to pour and prestress all the spans one after the other in a ‘precasting yard’ at one end of the bridge and use a ‘launching cradle’ to convey the spans, one by one, to their final position – as shown in the video.

The higher the bridge, the more falsework is saved.

A similar technique is ‘incremental launching’ where the spans are tied together and launched as a continuous beam (usually with a steel ‘nose’ bolted to the first one) which slides across the tops of the piers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_launch

Millau Viaduct (which has a steel deck) was launched by a variant of this method.

Insects with cuticle proteins that diffract light of different colors depending on the angle are fairly common. There is even a mosquito, Sabethes cyaneus, that shows blue, purple, or bronze depending on the lighting.

In this case, the goldbug can change from being iridescent gold from all angles, to dull reddish. Presumably this is controlled by regulating the amount of hemolymph in the outer cuticle, so changing the separation of these layers and their action as a diffraction grating.

Let him go, Cleft. His chin themed brand of evil can never triumph. For wherever there is a single blade of grass in the lawn of all that is good…No…Wait…As long as there is a single slice of justice on the deli-tray that is goodness, our sandwich of righteousness will always be a low-fat and delicious victory!

I hunted around on google & the consensus opinion is it relates to depth perception while feeding – the eyes being too far apart around the skull for binocular vision, but I have doubts. Here’s a vid showing the feeding behaviour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q1UI0oh86Y

Another theory is that it disturbs their target food of insects & earthworms

Another is that the bobbing mimics the motion of lapping water to make them harder to see

Why on a flat open space as per your video? Why do those four snipes move in concert as if in a dance? Unfortunately we don’t get to see why they freeze suddenly – did the ‘point man’ [leading with a big gap & taking the maximum risk], freeze first & the other three copied?